What Is(n't) Environmental Stewardship? Eliciting Unspoken Assumptions Using Fisheries as a Model

Environmental stewardship is often invoked as a net social good and an approach for achieving equitable and sustainable conservation outcomes, but it is rarely defined explicitly in management settings, and conflicting definitions have proliferated. This lack of consensus can influence conservation outcomes in several ways. Conflict can arise between stakeholders with different definitions of stewardship; managers may not proactively identify important stakeholders whose stewardship orientation does not include public advocacy; and stakeholders whose sense of stewardship does not include in-depth knowledge of a particular ecosystem may advocate for ineffective or counterproductive actions. Developing strategies for identifying the implicit, unspoken definitions of environmental stewardship held by resource users, managers, and scientists can help with navigating these challenges. Here, we develop a method to elicit the unstated stewardship orientations of a group of stakeholders in a shared conservation setting. Using thought experiments and a Policy Delphi process, we find that even within our relatively homogeneous test group of recreational fisheries managers and scientists, individuals differed in their understanding of stewardship. We encourage conservation organizations with a mission of stewardship, or ones that interface with environmental stewards, to adopt an approach like this one to identify potential sources of conflict, inequity, and ineffective action before they arise.